Carding is a credit card fraud. It's a very serious crime. Spywares that makes identity thefts can track user's credit cards numbers if he was using online shop's services. If this information reaches people that would use it for illegal purposes, user can loose all his money and even more. Carding's and victims of dialers loose a lot of money.
Is it the same as phishing?
Phishing is an illegal action when email is sent to a user under the false pretence of being a legitimate enterprise such as a financial institution, service provider, or online retailer. So it's a bit different from carding. But it's the way to get credit's card number. User that got e-mail, goes to the website of that financial institution and updates his private data: password, name, last name, credit card's number, bank accounts number, etc. But both, phishing and carding are threated to user's privacy.
Prevention- Try to not to use Internet when you have to enter password, credit card number, etc.
- If you have registered on Internet, write down the web site's URL and read carefully the conductions of using that site.
- If you have Internet Filtering software, block known pshishing sites' URLs.
- Get anti-spyware software that block known phishing e-mails and spam.
- Get XoftSpy software that can remove thousands of other Carding definitions, automatically and instantly.
Is it a threat?
Phishing is getting widespread. A new Gartner Inc. study reports that phishing scams have exploded in number in the past year with a 50% increase over 2003. As many as 30 million people have been subject to phishing attacks, and 1.78 million people may have fallen victim to the online scams, which are used for identity theft. In the study, 3 percent of survey respondents reported having been drawn into a phishing scam. Gartner estimates that direct losses from identity theft fraud against these phishing attack victims cost U.S. banks and credit card issuers about $1.2 billion last year.